My work focuses primarily on the literature and culture of the long nineteenth century, with particular interest in the ways writers responded to and participated in the processes of modernization and globalization. Most particularly, I am interested in how writers engage aesthetic forms, modes, figures, and tropes in ways that destabilize conventionalities and open space within the broader cultural imagination to consider the fate of romanticism, individualism, and humanism in the modern age.

Publications

“From Tea to Chloral: Raising the Dead Lily Bart," Twentieth Century Literature 44.4 (1998): 409-427.

"Far from the Madding Crowd and the Cultural Politics of Serialization," Victorian Periodicals Review 30.4 (Winter 1997): 331-349.

“Victorian Things, Victorian Words: Representation and Redemption in Gaskell’s North and South,” The Victorian Newsletter 92 (1997): 21-24.

Conference Presentations

“Fallen Into Discourse: Two Victorian Serial Novels and the Shifting Perception of Women’s Roles in the 1860s,” Reception Study Society Conference; St. Paul Hotel and St. Catherine University; St. Paul, MN; September 21-23, 2017.

(Please see my CV for prior conference papers and panels.)

Current Projects

"Fallen Into Discourse: Serialization and the Micropolitics of Gender in Wives and Daughters and Armadale"

• This essay finds that the Deleuzean notions of "collective assemblage" and "incorporeal transformation" provide a useful vocabulary for describing the ways in which the serial magazine became a fluid discursive space that registered the minute, incremental, disordered, but nonetheless powerful steps the culture was taking towards change. It finds that Victorian readers in the 1860s regarded both progressive initiatives and the regressive tropes of gender and class with a certain degree of cultural curiosity, a curiosity that signaled a nascent form of engagement in social evaluation and transformation. In the broadest sense, it asks the questions: how does cultural change happen, and what role does aesthetic representation play in this process?

"The Uncanny as Gothic Epistemology in Tana French's In the Woods"

• This essay explores the ways in which French engages the aesthetic trope of the uncanny epistemologically in In the Woods. It pays particular attention to moments in which the (unreliable) narrator experiences the uncanny, and it analyzes them as linguistic representations of repression that, if interrogated, yield insights into the state of mind of the narrator, as well as the power and limits of imagination itself.